


In the Days of Jael

by Selden



Category: Historical RPF
Genre: Biblical References, Gen, Gore, ill-advised poetry, rape in background context
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-10
Updated: 2016-07-10
Packaged: 2018-07-22 18:46:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7450099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selden/pseuds/Selden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Then Jael Heber's wife took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died.</i><br/> <br/>Judges 5. 21</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Days of Jael

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Selena](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selena/gifts).



Things women use in Artemisia's paintings:  
a brush, a bowl, a lute  
basins for bathing and a string of pearls.  
Lucretia holds up one breast; her dagger  
a thin white line above her thick white thigh  
A Magdalene tugs at her breast, her hair;  
pets a grey skull; Mary untucks her breast,  
holding it forwards, heavy with her milk.

"I pray thee," says Sisera, "give me a little water, for I am thirsty."  
On the white sheets beside her white-blue body,  
Cleopatra's asp uncurls, unclasped  
as she reclines, her grey lips lying open  
around her hips a sweep of costly blue.  
Her wide neck flexes, a stiff rib of flesh;  
her rolled-back eyes show by their milky curve  
that she has taken death; left it well-used.  
Behind her, women are opening the curtain,  
weeping. Jael the Kenite gives Sisera milk  
for sleeping. "Turn in," she says, "turn in to me,  
my lord; fear me not."

In other paintings women crouch to swaddle  
Holofernes' head, or hold it at their hip in a straw basket,  
while Judith rests her sword upon one shoulder,  
looking out, not back  
towards the works of her hand  
lying on the bed.  
In the first painting of the beheading,  
Judith wears blue; tugs her sword  
sideways into Holofernes' neck  
through the tough windpipe to the scoop of tendon,  
shrimp-curled and tender, caught by the fierce light.  
Blood snakes away across the sheets, and Judith cuts,  
taking him by the hair with her clenched fist  
as her maidservant holds back his reaching arms.

The second time around, the blood comes up  
in perfect little fronds and fishbone arches; rude red dots  
hot on Judith's right breast,  
touched up with white, for shine.  
Maidservant at her back,  
Judith uses her sword in gold  
in blood, in the wide dark  
lying behind his opened thighs,  
the red rucked up across his hips,  
the mattress folding under him like slabs of tripe,  
the neat small teeth lining his mouth like pearls.  
His flesh dough-dimples where the hilt digs in,  
and brawny Judith in her golden dress,  
she uses her full strength, brows knitted;  
both arms bearing down.  


Susannah, spied on as she bathes  
her solid pale young body, uses  
a gesture taken from a Michelangelo  
from Adam, leaving Eden, arms  
outstretched, beseeching,  
before the sharp eyes of the elders,  
the angel with his sword.  
"Is there any man here?" says Sisera.  
"If any ask, thou shalt say no."

Jael the Kenite, wife of Heber,  
covers Sisera with a mantle,  
wipes clean his milky mouth, her brush,  
her breast where she has left a smear of paint.  
Outside the window, coming from the river  
are women holding baskets in their arms,  
leaving dark drips behind them, passing,  
talking, their voices rising up like starlings  
bulging in clouds and columns, falling, falling  
down the blue Roman evening sky.

Susannah holds out Adam's hands  
before the gates of Eden; Buonarroti's angel  
a small red drift foreshortened in midair  
holds out Lucretia's dagger, flaming, streaming  
towards the bulge right under Adam's ear,  
the curve of bone the Magdalene likes to stroke  
as Mary, fiddling with her aching breast, her dress,  
cups in her other hand the head of God  
not one year old, his small hands  
reaching up.

Then Jael Heber's wife took a nail of the tent,  
and took a hammer in her hand.  
Artemisia paints her wearing yellow silk  
over a white chemise, her strong right arm  
holding the hammer up; Sisera's head  
upon her lap, the nail positioned  
right behind his ear, on the small curve,  
a chisel clasped in Jael's careful hand.  
And Deborah, a prophetess,  
she judged Israel at that time. "Blessed,"  
she said, "shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be,  
blessed shall she be above women in the tent."

The yellow dress shines, clean of blood  
waiting for Jael to bring her hammer down.  
Bunched up and sturdy as a toddler at her feet, Sisera sleeps.  
The starlings yell across the sky of Rome;  
the milk inside his stomach sits and sours.  
Above his bundled hips, chiselled into a pillar,  
is Artemisia's name.  
"The mountains melted," says Deborah, "the earth trembled.  
The heavens dropped," says Deborah.  
"I arose," she says. "I arose a mother in Israel."  
Artemitia (sic) made this, she says. And the date: M.D CXX  
laid out like that, the gap between the curves  
of D and C, so many hundred hundred years,  
as solid as the space between Jael's hands.

"He bowed," says Deborah. "At her feet he bowed,  
he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell:  
where he bowed, there he fell down dead."  
Next to Sisera's soft pink knees  
lies his sheathed sword, a silly monster on its pommel  
with an inscrutable and sleeping face.  
Jael, blessed above women, judges her moment.  
"He asked water," says Deborah, "and she gave him milk.  
She put her hand to the nail,  
and her right hand to the workmen's hammer."

When she is older, Artemisia  
will show a woman lifting her brush  
to a painting just off the edge of the canvas.  
An Allegory of Painting; most likely a self portrait,  
the woman hooks her palette with her thumb,  
reaches up with her right hand  
and, working just out of sight and stroke by stroke  
having come softly, having at her back  
against the darkness many divers colours  
holding her brush up, putting her hand to it, raising, raising,  
she fastens down the world. 

**Author's Note:**

> Main paintings mentioned:
> 
> [Lucretia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_Gentileschi#/media/File:Lucretia_by_Artemisia_Gentileschi.jpg)
> 
> [Cleopatra](http://www.artemisia-gentileschi.com/cleopatra2.html)
> 
> [Judith and her Maidservant](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gentileschi_judith1.jpg)
> 
> [Judith Beheading Holofernes (1611-2)](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuditta_che_decapita_Oloferne_\(Artemisia_Gentileschi_Napoli\)#/media/File:Gentileschi_Artemisia_Judith_Beheading_Holofernes_Naples.jpg)
> 
> [Judith Beheading Holofernes (1620-1)](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuditta_che_decapita_Oloferne_\(Artemisia_Gentileschi_Firenze\)#/media/File:GENTILESCHI_Judith.jpg)
> 
> [Susannah and the Elders](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susanna_e_i_vecchioni_\(Artemisia_Gentileschi_Brno\)#/media/File:Susanna_and_the_Elders.jpg)
> 
> [Expulsion from the Garden of Eden](http://www.wga.hu/html_m/m/michelan/3sistina/1genesis/4sin/04_3ce4.html) (Michelangelo Buonarroti)
> 
> [Jael and Sisera](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giaele_e_Sisara)
> 
> [ Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoritratto_come_allegoria_della_Pittura#/media/File:Self-portrait_as_the_Allegory_of_Painting_by_Artemisia_Gentileschi.jpg)
> 
> NB: Biblical quotes have been subjected to both paraphrase and chopping about.


End file.
